A commerce site may offer services to its customers such as obtaining price quotations from distributors, transferring a shopping cart to a distributor or placing an order at a distributor store. The distributor may be on a remote web site or may be hosted on the same site as the manufacturer. The processes of quotation, shopping cart transfer and order transfer between the site and the distributors may vary among the different participating distributors and manufacturer. In traversing the differences, a reseller may have to log on to disparate sites, each with their own authentication systems, business processes and IT (information technology) infrastructures. Typically, each of the differing implementations of business logic at each distributor or manufacturer has to be accommodated by a unique communications means between the business entities.
In a typical manner, previous electronic commerce (“e-commerce”) systems have been tailored to specific individual commerce offerings, and not particularly well suited to handling a wide variety of distributors, manufacturers and resellers. The advent of the Internet provided a widely used communications transport mechanism, but typical commerce applications had application logic and business rules and logic combined with server support. This combination caused business flexibility to be reduced due to the implementation of business logic in conjunction with application logic. Although applications may be common across business entities, differences in business rules and logic kept the systems apart and caused differing solutions to be created. Typical systems were therefore monolithic in nature, comprising all required elements in a self-contained solution. Unfortunately, this often meant unique or disparate systems of applications.
The spread of applications delivered using the just described mechanisms caused a lack of interoperability and a need for customers to logon to differing systems to handle a variety of desired products or services or for providers to maintain equivalent offerings across differing architectures to meet their customer needs.
Typical e-commerce systems included those with processing capability for business transactions between different users on the same system sharing the same marketplace. Other systems enabled transactions between suppliers and customers without dealing with the issues of communication between the various entities.
There is therefore a need to provide a more efficient means of enabling commercial interaction across or among applications and systems between suppliers and marketers of goods and services.